Our God is an Awesome God
Are you still with me?
Now, describe exactly what your closest friend is doing, what and who are near your friend and how much water vapor is in the air. Then do the same for your friend’s cousins — all of them, including their cousins.
Now look up and see all the satellites in orbit and read all the data plates on them in all their different languages. Watch the progress of the space exploration vehicles that have been launched over the years and know the exact number of asteroids that are orbiting the sun including their size, shape and density as well as all the comets. Experience a new sun being born in the middle of the Andromeda galaxy and the explosion of a sun in the galaxy just beyond.
Know what the whales are doing in the Pacific Ocean and which ones are being hunted. Hear the cry of the gull on the Maine coast and know what it last had to eat. Feel the joy of the Mongol mother who has just given birth.
Even if you were to comprehend all of these and then expand it to every living creature on this earth and every object in the universe you would be totally underestimating God for He is far greater than this. However, the God I have described thus far is very detached. He knows a lot, but that is about it. Thankfully, God is much, much more.
While He knows all I have described (and far more), He also knows our every thought, desire and what is in our hearts — each and every one of us, even those who deny Him. He knows our joys and our sorrows; our strengths and our weaknesses; our victories and our defeats; what we love and what we fear. He also knows when we do what is right and what is wrong — that’s right and wrong according to Him, not our feeble attempt to rationalize our actions in order to make ourselves feel better.
Here we come to the truly beautiful and awesome part of God. Even though He knows all about us, He actually cares about what we do and who we are even though we are so deplorably imperfect. It is much more than just caring, it is love in the fullest and truest sense of the word. No one is left out. He loves everyone on the earth today, has loved everyone who ever has been and will love everyone who ever will be.
It does not matter whether you are in perfect health, confined to a wheelchair or about to die. It does not matter if you have done innumerable good works or have been a complete reprobate your entire life. He loves you and wants you to be with Him in Heaven, forever, when your time on earth is finished.
However, God’s love is not the love politically correct humans want to define it as. It is not an all-accepting and acquiescing love. He is disappointed when we do things that are wrong. He is angry when we allow our pride to blind us to His love and turn away from Him. He cannot bear it when we deny him and allow other priorities to take precedence over Him. Ultimately He will turn His wrath upon us on Judgment Day and we will not be able to stand it.
“Wait! Wait! You were fine until the last paragraph. Didn’t you just say that God loves us? How can He also hate us?”
It’s not that he hates us. He hates what we do when we deny Him. We deny Him by words (saying God doesn’t exist, for example) or deeds (having an affair, lying, stealing, etc.). He hates when we go against what is right, in His eyes, and when we fall short of what He wants for us. God wants us to be perfect like He is.
“Hold it, no one is perfect — we’re humans after all. We are going to make mistakes.”
That is absolutely true. God cannot have us close to Him because He is perfect (Holy) and we are not.
“So He isn’t so awesome after all. If we cannot get close to God because we are going to make some mistake and make Him upset with us, then He must not really care for us since there is no way to get close to Him. Heaven, if there is one, is always going to be out of our reach.”
You are right to say Heaven is always going to be out of your reach no matter what you do. You can do every good deed you are physically able to do, give all your money away to charity, love everyone as much as you can, but it still will not be enough. You will stumble, you will have anger and hate flash through you; you will fail. It is inevitable — we are humans. Just think of how many of the Ten Commandments you have broken in even the slightest way either by the letter of the law or the spirit of the law. Even one mistake will make you unworthy of Heaven.
“So there is no hope. We might as well do whatever we want because it really doesn’t matter.”
Now it is my turn to say hold on! Remember I said God loves everyone no matter what? Well, He also knows we would need a way to pay the price for all the wrongs we do in our life — past, present and future — because we cannot do it on our own.
The cost for breaking God’s laws (sin) is death, not just your earthly death but your eternal death. Therefore, someone else would have to die in your place in order to redeem this debt you owe and allow you entry into Heaven. That someone would also need to be as perfect and sinless as God, otherwise the price paid would not be enough.
Obviously, no human could do that since no human is perfect. This is why God had to come to earth to live and to die in our place. This is why we celebrate Christmas. The birth of Jesus in the flesh is God’s gift to us so we can be with Him in Heaven.
“WHAT?? Jesus is God? He was just another guy who had some neat gifts from God to heal people and perform miracles, wasn’t he?”
That is what some want you to think. The truth is Jesus is God. He has to be since only His perfect sacrifice (when He died on the cross) would suffice to pay for all the wrongs we all have done, are doing and will ever do. Jesus, being 100% God, is perfect. Jesus, also being 100% man, is the required perfect sacrifice and replacement for each of us. He had all the sins of the entire world (including yours) laid on Him while He was on the cross. He paid your penalty, along with the rest of humanity’s, with His death. If you have faith and truly believe in Jesus, you believe in God and that is enough to wipe away all your sins and allow you to go to Heaven and be with God.
“So let me get this straight…God knows everything about everything; even anything I do. Because I’m not perfect, I cannot be with God in Heaven when I die. But Jesus came to earth and then died for me to pay for all the wrong things I have done and will do in my life so I can go to Heaven as long as I believe in Jesus. So all I have to do is say I believe in Jesus and I’ll be all set.”
Close. You can say anything you want, but it is what you believe in your heart that God cares about. Have you opened the door to your heart for Jesus or have you merely claimed to believe and kept your heart locked up for yourself? When you have a gun to your head or that gun is pointed at your child’s head and the person holding the gun says if you believe in Jesus he will pull the trigger, what will you say? Who do you trust?
“You ask too much!”
It’s no more than what Jesus did for us. He willingly allowed others to kill Him for our sake when He was totally innocent because there was no other way to accomplish God’s plan of salvation for humanity and for you. Are you willing to totally trust His plan for you, even if it means dying for your faith? Your eternal life depends on that answer.
That is what it comes down to — eternity. Our life on earth is not all there is. The promise, the good news, is there is a way to guarantee your place in the most wonderful and awesome place: in Heaven with God forever. There is also a way to guarantee you will die an eternal death in a lake of fire and that is by not fully accepting Jesus. It is the most simple, but also the most difficult, decision you will ever make in your life.
Choose wisely.
We humans, who are so imperfect in so many ways, are whom God wants to be with Him in Heaven. Yet, He cannot have all of us there unless we have chosen to put our faith and trust in Jesus. For the faithful, the joy of being with God in Heaven will be far greater than we can even begin to imagine. This is what makes God so amazing — that He would want to allow us an opportunity to be with Him in His home forever.
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